


One Of Our First-Name Moments

by tornyourdress



Category: Maeve Kerrigan Series - Jane Casey
Genre: Co-workers, Detectives, F/M, First Time, Friendship/Love, Police Procedural, Porn with Feelings, Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-29
Updated: 2020-05-29
Packaged: 2021-03-03 06:00:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24440068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tornyourdress/pseuds/tornyourdress
Summary: Two detectives, years of sexual tension, something's got to give.
Relationships: Maeve Kerrigan/Josh Derwent
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	One Of Our First-Name Moments

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for everything up to and including THE CUTTING PLACE (book 9, 2020).

Derwent barely waited until the door had been slammed shut behind us before remarking, “Well, that went about as well as I thought it would.”

My face, already heated from what an epic disaster the last five minutes had been – a potential witness I was so sure would respond to my attempts at female-solidarity, special-place-in-hell-for-women-who-don’t-help-other-women bonding. But it hadn’t worked with that girl.

I kept thinking of her that way – girl, rather than woman – even though she was twenty-five, not because I was ‘getting on’ in years (as one particular colleague had recently taken to suggesting, as though marathon-running somehow made you immortal, turning the tables on my own fondness for noting his age) but because she was an Instagram influencer. That was her whole, entire job. And even as I’d (smugly) explained to Derwent about how the world was changing and he needed to get with the times, I hadn’t really imagined that it was the kind of job any real grown-up had.

“So much for sisterhood,” he continued, and I resisted the urge to punch him. It was a skill I’d developed over the years – a vital one if you worked with this guy, especially if you were a woman. 

Sometimes I didn’t want to punch him. Sometimes – this was the more surprising development – I wanted to punch others on his behalf. Not that he needed me to. And it would be mortifying for him to have a lady come to his defence (although that wasn’t a half-bad reason for trying it sometime, I mused). 

Today wasn’t one of those days, though. 

“She has a whole channel devoted to her feminist icons!” I snapped. “She’s a brand ambassador for at least three different charities that specifically help women.” Derwent looked at me as if I was speaking a different language, and I took note. “Yes, I actually bothered doing my research. Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?” He smirked. I hated that smirk. 

I mostly hated that smirk. There had been occasional moments in the past where my body had responded strangely to that smirk. But I had long known that there was a part of me, that risk-taker part that sometimes paid off when following a lead, that was out to get me when it came to matters of the heart. (Maybe not just the heart…)

“Like I’m a fifteen-year-old girl.” I had picked the age at random, plucked it from the air as a generic ‘ditzy teenager’ age, and as soon as I saw Derwent’s face I realized my mistake. 

There was a moment where the name Angela hovered between us like an unexploded bomb, and it was up to one of us to either detonate or defuse the thing. 

He squinted at me, moved a tiny bit closer. Something was happening to my breath – it didn’t quite appear to be operating as it was meant to – and then he reached out a hand. Touched the side of my head ever-so-gently. Looked me right in the eyes and said, “Fifteen? Not with those grey hairs coming in, darling.”

And the kicker was, of course, that I had to let him have that one. 

***

The murder victim was a young woman – as they so often were, and I sometimes found myself wondering how the rest of the world could bear to have jobs that didn’t involve trying to get justice for these poor souls – who worked as a journalist but had just published her first novel, all about that strange world of online influencers. The girl – woman, I mentally corrected myself – we’d just been speaking to, or trying to, had been at university with her, and attended the book launch, so an outsider might imagine they were friendly, but there was a great deal of discussion online about whether or not characters were based on real people – particularly old friends. I’d been up late trying to get my head around all this internet drama, figuring that the best approach to take was not ‘concern for your friend’ (astonishingly, in this line of work basic human decency wasn’t always something you could count on) but to play on her feminist credentials, to appeal to her sense of herself as a virtuous human. It was, after all, part of her ‘brand’. 

It hadn’t worked, and sitting in the car next to Derwent, who was silent but somehow still radiating a sense of told-you-so, made me want to scream. I settled instead for snapping at him about his driving, which then made me feel like his wife. Which was even more terrifying. 

“Kerrigan,” he said, shaking his head, “you really need to get –”

“If you say ‘laid’ I will _throttle_ you.” I sounded like my mother. Not the first part of the sentence, of course. 

“Me? Would I say such a thing?” He feigned innocence. “I was going to say, get _off_.”

“Phrasing it differently doesn’t make it less offensive or unprofessional.”

“They’re not synonyms,” he said patiently, like I was a small child. “What would the sisterhood think of if they heard you being so – so _reductive_ about sexual pleasure?” 

It occurred to me that Derwent had clearly been doing his Instagram research too, only with a different focus. We had another influencer to call upon later; she made videos about ‘sex positivity’ and other phrases I had never encountered in my Catholic upbringing. 

“Get to the punchline, please,” I said wearily, because there was no way in hell Derwent actually cared about any of the issues here aside from whether ‘sex positivity’ meant young women would be more likely to sleep with him. Not that he seemed to have been with anyone since things fell apart with his girlfriend, but then again, how would I have known? He felt as entitled to erect barriers around his own personal life as he did to trample all over mine. 

“No punching, Kerrigan, we haven’t agreed on a safe word.” He made a disapproving sound. “What I mean is, as you should well know, you don’t need someone else around to have –”

“Stop.” I groaned. I wasn’t sure whether it was not getting enough sleep, or the frustration at having messed things up, or whether this was one conversation of this kind too many, but I felt dangerously close to tears. And there was just enough of a wobble in my voice to give that away. 

He looked over at me. 

“Eyes on the road,” I wanted to say, but didn’t quite trust myself to get out. 

“We’ve a tough job,” he said. “You’ve been through a lot of shit recently, never mind all the stuff we deal with day-to-day. We all need to let off steam. And – if you don’t have someone – hey. You do what you have to do.” He shrugged. “Don’t get embarrassed.”

“I’m not,” I muttered. 

“I can recommend some useful websites –”

I slammed my hand onto the dashboard. “OK. OK. Fine. You want to do this? Nine o’clock tonight, my place. See you there.”

There was a silence, and I thought: finally. That’ll shut him up. I’d called his bluff.

“You sure about this?”

“See. You. There,” I hissed. 

***

Of course it would have been more dramatic if I’d been able to storm off then and there, instead of having to keep working through till the end of our shift. But the victory over him gave me an energy for the rest of the day that I needed. I knew he would never actually turn up. It would put both our careers at risk, for one thing. And for another – I didn’t really believe that Derwent wanted to sleep with me. He wanted to shock, he wanted to unsettle – he didn’t _want_ me. 

Leaving work, I said to him, “See you later” with the absolute certainty that I wouldn’t.

It was only in the flat – his flat, not that it felt like that anymore, not since his redecoration for me –that I began to worry. 

And prepare. Tidy up a little (both myself and the flat). Attempt something with my hair. Put on sexy – no, never mind that. Put on comfortable nightwear, an over-sized t-shirt. But perhaps silky knickers underneath. Just in case. 

Jesus Christ. I sat on the sofa and wondered what had gotten into me. 

Except I knew exactly what it was. Or rather what it wasn’t.

Since the last man I had offered my heart to on a silver platter had broken me in ways I still hated thinking about, I hadn’t slept with anyone else. I was afraid of getting hurt – and I don’t just mean emotionally. I was afraid of being overpowered, of freezing up despite all my combat training, of being blamed for it later. Before everything that had happened – and there’d been more than a few unsettling encounters with men even before _him_ – I’d been sympathetic to women in situations like those. Pitying, even. Now I _understood_. 

So I hadn’t been having sex. It wasn’t surprising, under those circumstances. But what had got under my skin was the fact that Derwent was – as usual – _right_. In jobs like ours, you needed to do _something_ to get it all out of your system, and masturbation was the quickest, easiest, cheapest way to do it. 

But I hadn’t been doing that either. Not since – everything. 

Maybe if I’d grown up in a world where social media influencers posted regularly about how amazing ‘self-love’ was, it would be a different story. But that wasn’t my world. I didn’t want it to be, really. I hadn’t even thought about any of this until – 

_Damn_ him. 

And then the knock came on the door. Which was a nice polite touch, seeing as he had keys.

***

He’d brought wine. Even poured himself a glass, grasping the stem rather than cupping it like his usual whiskey. He was upping the stakes, now. That old episode of _Friends_ popped into my head (even working long hours didn’t make it possible to avoid the endless repeats) and I felt ridiculous, but not ridiculous enough to stop. 

“Thanks for this,” I said, holding up the glass, taking a sip. Then placing it back down again. “But maybe we should just get to business.”

He looked at me with a flicker of amusement and then – possibly – lust? Was I being delusional to see that there? No, I reminded myself, because I was a woman wearing very little and we were alone together and that would be enough for him, it didn’t necessarily _mean_ anything…

“Don’t rush me, darling. We’ve plenty of time. I’m not on the clock.”

We sat next to each other on the couch, angled towards each other, not yet touching, and I waited for him to make the first move before realising I should. I edged close enough so that our knees touched, so that I was very aware of his breathing, his scent, his _there_ -ness. 

“Anyway,” he continued, “it’s not business. Not this. First I’ll have to kiss you.” I waited for him to lean in, but he just kept going. Great talker, when it suited him. “Gentle at first. Then a little longer. Little deeper. My hand just here on your face to begin with” – here he began sketching in the air, but never actually touching me – “before tracing the neckline of what is, can I just note, a desperately unsexy bit of nightwear.”

A tiny laugh escaped me then, and it suddenly felt safer, for a moment, and then not at all again, because he kept going. Describing everything he would do to me – his fingers lifting up the hem of the much-maligned t-shirt (“when I say I like the natural look, Kerrigan, I’m not making the case for sackcloth and ashes here”), moving between my thighs, slipping inside my knickers (“we’re not taking these off just yet, I’m just going to move them aside, just a little, just so I can brush my fingers against you”), with his other hand on my breasts, and then his mouth on them, and the wretched t-shirt cast aside, and his mouth on me, his fingers in me, and I would be so wet (“jesus, Kerrigan, you’ll be _dripping_ , it’s fucking beautiful”) so gasping for breath… 

… and all the while the only part of us touching were knees, mine bare, his clothed, while his hands brushed close to the body parts he referred to but never actually touching them, and I could have sworn his eyes were getting darker as he kept going, and I wanted to be _touched_ so badly that it took me a moment to notice when he’d stopped speaking. 

“And then you introduce your favourite organ?” I said, trying to sound pert. 

I was waiting for a grin. A nod of approval that I’d got to the point. But instead he just kept _looking_ at me, before saying, “Not tonight, sweetheart.” And then he leaned in – I felt almost dizzy – and kissed me on the cheek. Then he got up and walked towards the door. “Goodnight.”

What the – what the actual fucking _hell_ had just happened? 

I waited for him to come back, squirming, _ready_ , but he didn’t. I couldn’t figure out quite what he was playing at but my brain wasn’t particularly sharp. It wanted satisfaction, it wanted pleasure, and when my fingers moved inside my knickers I was just as wet as he’d promised, and I thought about that and then I thought about nothing else except more of _this_ , feeling and sensation, building and building inside me, me, me, me in my body again, and I came with a series of gasps that I hadn’t even known I could make on my own. That I hadn’t even known I’d been waiting for. 

***

I meant to corner him the next day, but we were busy with the case; the victim had gone missing immediately after her book launch and we still hadn’t been able to figure out who’d seen her last. One ex-boyfriend had an airtight alibi; another had yet to be tracked down. A nervous publicist seemed semi-promising, until it turned out she was guilty of no more than bitching about the book on her private Twitter account. The sort of thing that might get you reprimanded at work but not arrested for murder. And then there was a question mark over her estranged mother…

It was all, anyway, more important than a discussion about why exactly someone might come over only to dirty-talk someone into a frenzy and then skip off on their merry way. That was the thing I couldn’t figure out. I could understand wanting just to mess with my head – but he’d been into it too. As dazed as I’d been, I’d noticed the bulge in his trousers as he left. Derwent’s capacity to walk away from sex on offer wasn’t an aspect of his personality I was familiar with. To say the least. 

I found myself imagining him making his way to his car that night, and then unzipping his fly and moving his hand up and down his cock until he came, quick and grunting, thinking of me. Which moved into imagining his cock inside me. I imagined if the things he’d said were things he’d actually done. I imagined that smart mouth working magic on me, because, really, wouldn’t his tongue be much better used swirling around my clit than on saying actual words that had the (great) risk of offending people?

In retrospect it was a miracle I was able to concentrate on my work at all, and yet despite it all, I was. I was focused, and alert, combing through the physical evidence and the witness testimonies and spotting the threads, bringing it all together. I was on top of things. 

I was also getting myself off more regularly than I ever had in my life. That may have had something to do with it. 

***

It took more than a fortnight for the pieces to come together, for the ex-boyfriend’s airtight alibi to fall apart, for the estranged mother to prove to be more involved in her daughter’s life than we might have imagined, for a web of lies and sex and cheating to be uncovered – but the upshot was, we figured it out, and after the pair in question had been arrested and we were back at the station, I turned to Derwent in surprise and said, “It’s been a while since we got out of a case without either of us needing medical attention.”

I almost felt uneasy about it, like we’d cheated somehow. 

“It’s like we’ve cheated somehow,” he said, playing with the stapler on my desk. 

“That’s ex –” I stopped myself. Of course our brains were in synch. They had been for years, and it was one of the things about _us_ that let me continue justifying our dynamic, the one that everyone else in the world mistook for a bickering-lovers vibe, as a purely asexual thing. When of course it wasn’t. 

Because I wasn’t a helpless bimbo and because he did actually respect my brain and maybe it was time to admit that it was possible for respect and lust to co-exist. 

I looked up at him with precisely that thought in mind and of course he was grinning. 

“I hate you,” I said. 

“It’s much better for our relationship when one of us needs medical attention,” he responded. “I seem to recall declarations of love at one stage.”

I knew exactly what he was referring to, of course – hospital painkillers had a lot to answer for – but chose instead to throw back a, “Oh, pet, you’re always declaring your love for me, I can’t keep track.”

His eyes danced. “She finally notices! Good job, Detective Sergeant.”

I realised three things simultaneously: one, I didn’t have a good comeback. Two, he was serious. And three, several of our colleagues had stopped going about their business so that they could shamelessly eavesdrop on our conversation. 

_Fuck._

***

The next morning, in the kindest, gentlest way possible, Liv said, “Maeve, we deal with absolutely horrific crimes every single day. You and Josh are – well – a nice distraction for us all.”

I bristled. “But I don’t want anyone thinking that I’ve gotten where I am because of –”

“No one actually thinks that. Not anymore.”

“Except Belcott.”

“Not even him. And you know that, you’ve called him out on it often enough, now.”

“Well,” I said, unwilling to yield too much ground, “I still don’t like the idea that everyone thinks I’ve something - _going on_ with Derwent.”

She tried to hide a smile. “We’ve thought it for years. What’s changed?”

I blinked. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

Which was, of course, a lie, and she knew it.

***

After the realisation – or rather, The Realisation, it seemed to demand capital letters – I’d left my desk, and gone outside for some air. I wished, not for the first time, that I smoked. I yearned for something to do with my fingers. Instead I put my hands in my pockets, contemplating – again, not for the first time – the frustratingly tiny size of women’s pockets in comparison to men’s, and let a gentle breeze cool down my hot cheeks. 

I wasn’t surprised to find him appear at my left shoulder. “Kerrigan,” he said, nodding.

I offered up a tiny smile. “I think this might be one of our first-name moments.”

“Shit. I think you’re right.”

“It’s so much easier when one of us is possibly bleeding to death, isn’t it?”

“I’ll go back inside and chat to Burt for a bit; she’s bound to throw something heavy at me if I’m in there for more than five minutes.”

“I think that might be one of the most self-aware things you’ve ever said,” I noted. 

“I’m growing as a person,” he said with a straight face. It lasted for a whole three seconds, too. 

“Take me home,” I said softly, and for the life of me I couldn’t tell you how we got from one place to the other, or whatever nominal excuse we used to justify our absence from work, because the next thing I knew the door of the flat was swinging shut behind us and DI Josh Derwent and I were kissing in the way that people kiss in movies. I could almost hear the music swelling, imagine the camera spinning around, because the feelings those things tried to convey – all of those feelings were swirling around in my chest. 

It wasn’t just that he kissed well, that his mouth against mine was firm and his tongue teased rather than pushed its way inside, that his hand at the back of my neck was gentle, protective, while the one stroking the underside of my jaw was pure seduction. It was that it was a collision of lust and tenderness I’d never known before, some strange mixture of riding a rollercoaster and having a blanket wrapped around me, and when we finally took a breather, there were tears in my eyes. 

He was smiling at me, with the sort of soppy look that I would normally have taken the piss out of him for (even in the moment, with everything that was happening, some part of my brain was filing the detail away for future use), and then saw. His face fell. “Fuck. Maeve. I’m sorry, I – shit –”

I grabbed him firmly to keep him in place. “It’s not that. I just don’t understand how we haven’t done this before.”

“You weren’t ready.”

I immediately went on the defensive. “ _You_ weren’t ready.” And suddenly my hands were on my hips, like some kind of schoolmistress. “The last time you were here, you made me think you wanted something, and then you just left. What the hell was that?” The confusion of that night came flooding back. What was I _doing?_

“What did you do? After I left. What did you do?” He asked like he knew exactly what the answer was. Because of course he did. 

He leaned in. Kissed my neck. And then murmured into my ear, “And how many times?”

The tender-lust vortex threatened to pull me back in. “But why? I don’t get why you wouldn’t just –”

“Come to your rescue?” he supplied. 

Our eyes met. Hadn’t I been trying to tell him that for as long as I’d known him, that I didn’t need saving? Neither of us did. That didn’t mean not needing help. 

How quickly would I have grown to resent a man who ‘fixed’ my sense of myself as someone sexual, someone inhabiting a body capable of joy and pleasure and not just fear and anxiety and pain, instead of nudging me towards being able to help myself? 

“At least,” I said, moving closer, breathing him in, “tell me you got a good wank out of it.”

He laughed. “Several.”

***

We returned to the kissing at that point, which lasted minutes or perhaps hours or a century. It felt surreal and dreamy, all weirdly lit, but then I remembered that it was still the middle of the afternoon and the light streaming in wasn’t so much mystical as it was normal sunshine. 

And then I found myself distracted by Derwent’s cock – not out yet, still straining at the seams of his trousers, but I was aware of it, and I had – admittedly in less-than-ideal circumstances – seen it once before, and I wanted it in my hands, and in my mouth. I wasn’t the biggest fan of blowjobs. I didn’t know many women who were (Liv obviously got a pass on that one). I’d provided, of course, and was pretty decent at the whole thing, but it felt so caught up in expectations, and then there was the thing that men did – that head-push – which irritated me. (Why men thought it was a good idea to do anything that might induce teeth-grinding to a woman with their precious cargo in her mouth always mystified me.)

But there I was, unzipping, and then yanking down his trousers, then his boxers, and while I had been expecting ‘big’ I had not quite been anticipating ‘beautiful’. Not that I would _tell_ him. 

I licked my hand and then curved around his cock, watched his face scrunch up. Up and down, up and down – his mouth was open but no words were coming out (another unusual moment for him) – and when pre-cum seeped out of the tip, I added it into the mix, and then the little groans began. I’d heard his theatrical, fake noises before. These weren’t sounds for show, there was no performance here. 

The part of me that hadn’t been fucked by anything other than my own fingers in far too long was crying out for him, but more than that I wanted more of those sounds, and when I dropped to my knees, his cock in my mouth and my hands moving to toy with his balls – gentle at first, then rougher, testing him, learning – I got what I wanted. 

My tongue slid over the tip of him; I moved him in and out of my mouth, torn between wanting him all and having enough of a grasp on reality, even then, to be careful not to test my gag reflex. (The trouble with being a copper is knowing too much. Train or numb your gag reflex to provide better blow jobs, and your chances of choking or swallowing something toxic go up.)

After a few moments I felt his hands in my hair, and then after a few more they moved, and I was ready to deliver a firm lecture on head-pushing, but instead he was moving me away, gently, and I looked up at him, sagged against the door, still, and he said, softly, “It’s bad etiquette if I come before you, you know.”

I shrugged. “We’ve plenty of time.”

But I didn’t object to being pulled up for another round of kissing, and touching, and there was something thrilling about being still dressed while he was half-naked… 

At some point boots were kicked off, shirts undone. By the time we moved into the bedroom Derwent hadn’t a stitch left on him, and I was down to my knickers, and when he gently pushed me onto the bed and continued his work – teeth gently grazing my nipples, hands stroking their way around my breasts – I took a moment. “Josh?”

He looked up. 

“I’m really appreciating the foreplay, it’s very thoughtful, but could you please –”

There was the tiniest flicker of doubt, of worry, across his face, and it melted me. 

“ – just fuck me because I’ll scream if you don’t.”

The delight on his face, then. I loved him. 

“Just a minute,” he said, ever-so-politely, and slid down to between my thighs. His tongue flickered out, through my knickers at first, which he’d let his fingers wander briefly inside earlier, and they were, indeed, soaked. I wanted to remind him that he was supposed to be fucking me, that whatever pseudo-chivalrous sex-code was involved in getting me off first wasn’t necessary, we could manage that as we went, or afterwards, it didn’t really – 

Then he pushed the material to one side and his mouth was on my clit and two of his fingers were curling inside me and I forgot how to talk. Everything was hot, wet, slick, and there was just enough pressure oh fuck yes there please yes more yes now now now NOW.

“Knew you’d be a screamer,” he said, pleased with himself, and I nudged him over on the bed and straddled him, leaning over to kiss him, the taste of me on his mouth, and after a few moments of that there was scrabbling in a nearby drawer for a condom and the usual routine with that, and as soon as it was on I manoeuvred his cock inside me. 

***

There are different takes on whether penetrative sex or oral sex is the more intimate act. It depends, of course, on whether you’re considering it from a legal standpoint, or a feminist standpoint, or a medical standpoint – but my own personal belief was that it depended on eye contact. 

I was not the only woman I knew who had felt like a mere penis-receptacle during a sexual encounter, rather than a human being. But I also knew that when you were looking at someone and they were looking at you and you were moving together, moving against each other for friction and pressure and bliss, that it was like nothing else. 

Derwent kept his eyes locked on me as I rocked against him, slowly at first, and then faster, and he was solid underneath me and solid inside me and I had that brief desire to cry again, but his face, the sounds, there they were again, and oh the feel of him inside me. I shifted position slightly, and he groaned in that way I already knew was the good kind, and it was even more intense now, and within moments he was looking at me with wonder, with _awe_ , and then shuddered violently, beautifully, and sank down onto the bed. “Fucking hell, Maeve.”

After I disposed of the condom, thinking, even now, _evidence_ , I settled back next to him. We hadn’t managed to get underneath the covers yet, but with a bit of shuffling we rearranged ourselves, and then we stayed there, holding each other. Hugging, really. Naked hugging. I had been able to accept his hugs for a long time now, and it was reassuring that this felt like more of the same. A relief to be able to be this close to him when there wasn’t a crisis or a disaster.

And after a while he said: “Maeve?”

“Yeah?”

He sounded serious, solemn even, as he began. “What we just did there…”

I was instantly alert. What was this going to be? 

“… would you say I’ve the biggest cock you’ve ever had?” 

I bit down gently on his shoulder as he laughed. 

***

Liv indulged me for all of five seconds when I insisted nothing had changed. But as for the rest of the team – well, it was fair to say that no one really noticed a difference (or maybe Derwent had pre-emptively threatened everyone). 

It took several months before I slipped up. A new case, and several leads to follow up. “I’ll talk to Josh –” I said, and realised that Burt was staring at me, one eyebrow raised. 

She managed a sigh/nod combination that reminded me of my mother from when I was a teenager: a real Irish-mammy I-suppose-I-can’t-stop-you tut of mild disapproval mixed with a dose of It’s-not-worth-my-while-trying-to-argue-with-you. “You do that,” she said, and dismissed me, and life, and work, went on.


End file.
